


the heaped ashes of the night

by intrikate88



Category: Embassy Row Series - Ally Carter
Genre: Gen, Literal Sleeping Together, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-10
Updated: 2016-08-10
Packaged: 2018-08-07 23:15:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7733581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intrikate88/pseuds/intrikate88
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-See How They Run, with many spoilers for the very end. </p>
<p>Grace, Dominic, Alexei, and Jamie, and the first tense hours in Germany. Grace has a lot of feelings about the different men in her life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the heaped ashes of the night

 I sit in the helicopter, my eyes fixed on the rise and fall of my brother’s chest; it’s nowhere even and full enough for my preference, and every time his breath hesitates I move my fingers from holding his hand to check his pulse.  

If I cause one more person I love to die, if my brother dies because of all the trouble that follows me, I won’t survive it. I barely survived my mother’s death; I can’t take a second time.

Dominic sits across from Jamie’s stretcher in the cramped space, and he checks on Jamie more frequently than I can, and with greater skill than I have. He’s capable of so much more than just stitching up a light stab wound, I know that now, but he hadn’t stuck around to try and save my mother when I shot her. His skills have their limits. 

It takes us just over two hours to fly from Adria to Germany, and somehow I manage to doze, despite everything. I keep jerking awake, of course, terrified that Jamie will die if I stop paying attention for a second, and even if that weren’t overwhelming all my other thoughts, sitting with Dominic and Alexei being silently intense should have been more than awkward enough to keep me acutely aware and awake. But adrenaline rushes never last forever, and the one that got me through the last few hours is bringing me down in its crash. When we land, I jolt back into consciousness without having realized I’d left it, and open my eyes to Alexei looking directly at me and then rapidly looking back to Jamie.  

I wipe the sticky crust of drool away from the corner of my mouth that had formed while sleeping with my mouth open. It’s just yet another gross thing for Alexei to have witnessed while I was too out of it to look normal. Add it to the list of unfortunate things he’s seen me do.

A medical team is waiting and ready to take Jamie even before the propeller blades stop, and I slip out of my seatbelt and jump down to follow the stretcher before anyone else has unbuckled. Dominic and Alexei follow me, but I barely notice as we head inside, directly onto a gurney headed for surgery. I keep hold one of Jamie’s hands as we rush down the hallway, while a nurse tries and eventually succeeds to stick the back of his other hand and start a saline drip.  

And then I am pulled to a stop as Jamie goes on without me. I struggle for a moment at being separated from him, not understanding why our hands have been pulled apart, and then realize Dominic has wrapped two arms around me and is holding me back from the sterile surgery where I’m not allowed. I’m so afraid of what will happen when Jamie is out of my sight. 

The three of us are led to an empty waiting room, and its lack of windows and florescent lights make me feel like we’re underground. I have no real idea where we are, underground or not, and even though it feels like the middle of the night I have no idea of the time, either. Dominic takes a seat between the two exits to the room, professionally surveying both, and Alexei and I sit together against the wall. He holds my hand, and I wish it comforted me like it had when we were running to the waterfall, just a day or two ago that feel like a lifetime. But the fact that he doesn’t let go keeps me from giving in to the urge to go running down the halls and find Jamie and make sure the doctors are saving him. 

Instead I sit in one place, my foot tapping against the floor. It doesn’t expend the nervous energy inside me. The waiting room has a few magazines on tables, and I don’t have to look at the covers to see that they’re years out of date. The walls and tiled floor are all grimly neutral colors, combining the lack of appeal of hospitals with the uniformity of military bases and coming up with something that makes me want to vomit, half because of my history with hospitals and half just to vary the color. Someone has attempted to bring a little life into the place by placing a small pot of red geraniums on a table, but they’re wilting with the lack of sun.  

I stare at them though, just for color, and it makes me think of the bloom of red on my brother’s chest, _on my mother’s chest, the way bright-dark blood blooms and spreads across fabric even as my mother falls, screams, “Grace!” and without a word, Jamie falls—_  

“Gracie!” Alexei says, pulling at my hand. I think maybe it’s not the first time he’s said my name, and I exhale, having forgotten to breathe and trying to push away the images. “Gracie, Dominic arranged for a place for us to stay and get some rest. Somewhere safe." 

“We can’t leave Jamie,” I respond automatically.  

“We’re not leaving Jamie,” Alexei tells me, and he looks as pale and drawn as I feel. I, of course, haven’t been on the run from a manhunt for the past several days. “There are guest suites for visiting officials here, and he’ll be in surgery for a while."

Dominic walks over. “Enough staff has seen us here. Germany should be safe, but it would be better to be out of sight.” He looks like he doesn’t want to have to remind me that I am apparently a lost princess and sister to the other lost heir who’s been bleeding out for the past few hours, and we’re accompanied by the target of a national, possibly international, manhunt. The one who’s the Russian ambassador’s son in an American military base at a time when Russia and the US are on tense terms and I can’t figure out why. I wouldn’t want to explain it to me either.  

Dominic nods to a man in a uniform who leads us down the hall, into an elevator, up a few floors, down a few more hallways, and finally to where the suites must be located. Maybe the man is military police, though he lacks an armband saying so; there are any number of things he could be, but he carries himself like my father does, and like Dominic does. Like Jamie is learning to at West Point, if he ever goes back. 

(He has to go back. He will live, and see that he can’t put life on hold just because I’ve been a crazy person and probably will continue to be one, and he’ll go back to West Point. Whether he graduates to go on to becoming the sort of person who can’t write home where he is for months at a time, that’s up to him.)

“I’m sorry, we only have one suite for you,” the man who led us here apologizes. Dominic doesn’t say anything, and I am at a loss to see why it should matter, in the midst of all of this.  

“Thank you, I am sure that it will suit our needs more than adequately,” Alexei says smoothly, rescuing us all with the least Russian-accented thing I’ve heard him say in a while. I follow Dominic into the room, and Alexei follows me, and a second later I realize they’ve done this on purpose— Dominic is efficiently checking the room for threats, and Alexei is close behind me, looking all around. Once Dominic has finished his sweep, Alexei nods to him and checks that the digital lock to our room has latched, and slides the deadlock into place. 

The suite is more than a bedroom, but less than an apartment; a wall extends halfway across the space to divide a bedroom from a living room with a couch and armchair, and then in the back, there is a small kitchen and a large bathroom. There is only one king-sized bed. 

For a fleeting second I imagine us all getting into bed together with me in the middle, and just sleeping securely like that until Jamie comes back for us, healed from the hole through his chest. But I wave the thought away; it’s only the product of an overtired brain. “You should sleep,” Dominic says, as if he’s read my mind, and I hope I didn’t say anything out loud. But he adds, “We don’t know what is happening next, and you both should be rested and ready for whatever happens,” and I think my private thoughts are safe.

“I’ll take the couch,” Alexei offers right away. 

“You’ve been sleeping outside, you deserve a proper mattress,” I tell him. “I’ll take the couch."

“You’re a princess, so you get the bed,” he shoots back, with a gleam in his blue eyes. 

“Shut up, Alexei,” I say. I’m not ready to deal with that, whatever it means for me. What it meant to my mother. “Just take the bed. Out of both of us, who’s more likely to get arrested and not get a good bed for a long time?"

Alexei tilts his head, considering. “That’s debatable.” I roll my eyes.  

“Okay, valid point. I’m going to go clean up,” I decide, beginning to realize that the evidence of the night has accumulated on me. The smoke from the festival, the blood from dining-room surgery on my brother— it all clings to my clothes and skin, and my arms are starting to itch from the blood, which I’d been too distracted to notice, flaking off. I need a hot shower and maybe one entire crying session that doesn't involve several audience members. “I don’t have any spare clothes,” I realize belatedly, lifting the hem of my bloodstained shirt.

“I will ask for some clothes to be found for you,” Dominic says. 

My tendency to get lost in my head doesn’t lend itself to quick showers, so by the time I get out, wearing the giant robe I found in the bathroom, the lights have been dimmed and Alexei is sleeping soundly on the couch, or at least giving the impression of it. I sigh, having lost that battle, and find some leggings and a loose shirt that seem roughly my size folded on the table that could pass for pajamas; if we had to get up to go see Jamie, it would also be enough to pass as clothes. I was glad it wasn’t a nightgown, because I didn’t want to take even a minute to change, when he came out of surgery. 

“Fine, just take the other side of the giant bed if you’re going to insist I sleep in it,” I tell the occupied couch, on the chance Alexei is listening to me. Dominic looks impassive as usual when I say that, but also I think I detect some note of disapproval at my inviting a boy to share my bed. If I wasn’t on the cliff’s edge of losing my mind with a wounded brother and royal title trying to push me off it, I might even care. 

“Are you going to sleep in the chair?” I ask Dominic, who has taken up residence in the corner armchair. He looks a little ill at ease in a comfortable chair, especially one wide enough to almost be a loveseat, but the position gives him a clear view of the entire suite and door entryway, and lets him sit mostly in shadow.  

“No. I will stay awake, for news and to keep watch." 

Of course. “Thank you,” I say quietly. “For all of this. Jamie, and getting us here—" 

“I am not doing this for gratitude, Grace Olivia."

I know he isn’t in this for my thanks; I know why he is fixated on protecting me, and sometimes knowing why feels like I know nothing about why at all. It was all simpler when he was only the man with the scar and I knew nothing. 

“Still,” I say, and leave it at that. I am tempted to lay a hand on his, but don’t feel that he would welcome the human contact, so instead I get into bed, slipping between the sheets and trying to settle myself down enough for sleep, without resorting to pills. 

But I lie awake, my exhaustion actually seeming to make me less sleepy, rather than more. Jamie was still in surgery, and I didn’t know what that meant: were the complications? What had happened to him, really, and did the fact he was pressed against me when he was wounded mean that the wound went straight through his chest? Did surgery normally take this long? With the attempts on both our lives, would we be safe here while he recovered, even though we were half a continent away from Adria?  

Adria, the country I was apparently the princess of?  

And what did that even mean? It was a constitutional monarchy; it wasn’t as if real political power rested on its throne, and I’d seen enough real political power shake my grandfather’s hand to know it. I wasn’t about to march into the palace and demand that Princess Ann give me her tiara. She wasn’t a political rival, she was a glamorous friend of my mother’s. 

(I didn’t want to think about if she wasn’t. I had shot my mother and lost her forever, but I kept finding memories of her tucked in places I didn’t expect, and Ann knew more about that girl my mother had been than perhaps anyone alive. To lose her would be to lose that part of my mother as well.) 

If being the lost princess of Adria had sent the Scarred Man to my mother’s door to ostensibly kill her, then to do the same to me, and now Jamie had been nearly killed, I didn’t want any part of it. I didn’t want to be trapped in a palace like it was a cage while constantly guarded. It was bad enough that I couldn’t turn around without running into Alexei, or Jamie, or Noah, or Dominic, all trying to protect me from myself. I had seen the Scarred Man in my mind for three years, haunting me out of the corner of my eye and becoming the object of my accusations in city after city, and here he was at last, just weeks after he’d been assigned to murder me, sitting in the corner of the room where I was trying to sleep as I entrusted him with my life. 

I’m not even aware of drifting off to sleep until the nightmare wakes me up.

I return to consciousness sucking in lungfuls of air and trying to claw the sheets away from my face, feeling as if I'm being smothered. It had been a dream of smoke and screaming, nothing out of the ordinary, but full of red doors I can’t force open as something closes in on me. Usually the faces of my pursuers in nightmares are faces I know, but not tonight. 

Tonight, that face is looking at me from the shadows.  

Needing to escape the clammy sheets, I push free of the tangle and roll out of bed. I swallow some water from the tap in the kitchen, and then sit next to Dominic in the big chair. I can feel the fabric of his jacket against my arm and the hard muscle beneath it. He breathes in even measures and doesn’t fidget; I suppose years of working security detail has given him experience into settling into his own skin without chafing at merely existing. I can’t imagine my body being still like that, not without the influence of medication; I’m constantly aware of the edge of anxiety constricting my chest and making me dizzy, the pull of gravity on my bones, the phantom smoke and fire in my nose and sight, the pains I ignore that seem to have no source or reason.  

Somehow though, just my contact with Dominic, arm to arm and thigh to thigh, through layers and layers of clothing, grounds me in his stillness. My post-nightmare hyperventilation slows to match his breathing. “Do you think Jamie’s going to survive?” I ask in a small voice. 

From this side, I can’t see the scar. “I have seen men survive much worse,” Dominic says.  

“My mother didn’t.” The bullet buried in her chest trickled blood into her lungs that she coughed out her mouth. Black blood had pumped out of her chest just like Jamie’s.

“I wasn’t able to do anything then, Grace Olivia,” he responds. “But I did all that was in my power to do, and I would have done it for your mother if I’d had the chance.” He’s silent for a moment. “I would have done anything for her."

“I know,” I tell him. I think about the names scratched in the rock on the island. “Did you always know she was a princess?"

“I knew after you were born. She wanted me to swear to keep you safe.” Dominic looks at me then, and I wonder what he sees now when he looks at me: murderer, crazy girl, princess? “She never needed my promise to ensure my protection." 

At that, I almost want to hug him, but I don’t know how. His arms have been around me many times now, but only to hold me back or contain me, not out of any signal of affection. Because I can’t figure that out, I lean my head on his shoulder instead, trying to still myself in connection with him.  

Like that, I fall asleep again, and for once, I don’t dream.

“Gracie? Gracie, wake up,” I hear, and open my eyes. Someone is touching me and I stifle the impulse to flinch; I’m no longer in all those inpatient facilities with doctors who didn’t ask before grabbing me. It is Alexei who has a hand on my leg, and is gently trying to shake me awake. I find that I have slipped from Dominic’s shoulder, curling into him with my face against his chest. He has reached an arm around me, resting it on my shoulders. It is more comfortable than I’ll admit out loud.

“What? Is it Jamie?” I ask Alexei, when my eyes focus.  

“He’s out of surgery, and he is in the recovery room as the anesthesia wears off,” Alexei answers.  

“Can we go see him?" 

“In twenty minutes, they said." 

I look up at Dominic’s scarred face, and dart a glance over at his arm around my shoulders. “I couldn’t reach my gun with you leaning on my arm,” he says, which might even be mostly true.

“Okay,” I say. “Let’s go see Jamie."

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Mary Oliver's poem "Morning Poem".


End file.
